Marriage Markets, Rage Bait, Life-lies
Links and recommendations
From the archives:
The Hidden Marriage Market. The college sorting machine has replaced traditional arranged marriages
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Links and recommendations:
The luxury beliefs of the progressive upper class by
(Oliver, a professor at Oxford, also has a superb Substack)Not All Experts Are Equal: Why We Must Distinguish Practitioners from Activists by
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Three interesting findings:
1. There is a difference between social intelligence and wisdom. Social intelligence helps you to understand and interact well with others. Wisdom, in contrast, seeks to discover a common good through a balancing of interests. Thus, a salesperson who sells a defective car to a customer might have the social intelligence to successfully manipulate the customer, but has not acted wisely. Wisdom is used toward the attainment of ends that produce a common good, whereas intelligence can be used in the service of either good ends or bad ones. (source).
2. Are some people wired to bounce back from failures more easily than are others? People who are higher in the personality trait of neuroticism tend to be less resilient. More resilient individuals reported higher openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness. (source).
3. The stressor that had the biggest effect on women’s disordered eating—the strongest predictor of developing an eating disorder—wasn’t men or attention from men. It was the presence of attractive women, of perceived romantic rivals. (source here and here).
On college as marriage market, there's something that I've long felt has broader social implications.
The average sex composition of an American university is 57:43 female to male - but there's another way to look at that number. At a minimum, 14% of the total population at the university consists of women who will not be able to find a monogamous, opposite sex partner within their natural dating pool (and the numbers are worse at many colleges). It's hard to imagine that not affecting their views on social justice, politics, etc.